Glue: Collective Improvising and Composing in Sound - Drawing - Performance

The workshop aims to prepare creative situations in improvisation by learning interactive strategies.

The process will involve research on INTENSITY, GLUE, AUTHENTICITY, RISK, AWARENESS, TRANSLATION.

Each session will start with a collective sound and drawing improvisation. From there we will try to understand what is the GLUE that keeps us together in a collective creative process and build setups to make it possible. The particular conditions of visual, performative and sound improvisation will be discussed and strategies of artistic translation will be introduced. There will be a research on agreed upon parameters which permit a melting of the disciplines. Sharing individual intentions with the collective will lead to the developpement of comunicative skills through the creative process.

Group Improvisation means collective composing. During the performance - through  communication with the other performers - musical or visual material is organized in structures. Elements of shape and sound are exchanged in the function of composing a shared form. This requires certain social qualities as empathy, respective acceptance, attention and communicative abilities as observing, listening connected to high flexibility. If the mode of playing/drawing/creating/performing is authentic and open, it may produce particular qualities. Out of the spontaneous situation may emerge  a  shared „moment-form“ or a shape which is unique and unforeseeable.

In the workshop these qualities and abilities are associated under the function of GLUE: GLUE between performers, GLUE between the performer and the tool/instrument, GLUE between youself and your intentions. The experienec of  GLUE within a group which is - during the workshop -  temporarily connected in time and space for a common practice.

Topics

- Translation between disciplines in the triangle: sound/drawing/performance

- Creating sustainable social relations through artistic practice

- Artistic research on authorship

Process

Each session will start with a collective sound and drawing improvisation. From there the contents of the daily work will emerge. The guided process may involve the research on intensity, glue, authenticity, risk, awareness, translation, authorship.

Questions we will discuss and elaborate in our common practice

What is the GLUE that may keep us together in a collective creative process?

How can I share my individual intentions with the collective?

Why is sharing traditionally associated with a loss instead of a benefit?

How can the different disciplines melt in time and space?

Who „owns“ the artistic output? Is it the artist, the viewer, the listener, the receiver?

How can we develop our comunicative skills in the creative process?

Ulrike Brand is a Cellist, Performer and Composer. On her instrument she has developed new techniques and an individual sound world. Her projects cross frontiers with language, dance, performance and visual arts. Her compositions are situated on the sliding scale between improvsation and composition. She writes esasays and keeps lectures and workshops. From 1989-1997 she founded and directed QPMC in Perugia, Italy. She has received many grants and residencies and is as well active as a curator of concert series and interdisciplinary projects involving visual arts, dance, language and live electronics.

Since 2018 she is lecturer for improvisation at the University of the Arts Berlin.

www.ulrikebrand-cello.com

 

 

 

Alf Löhr, born in Germany in 1957, studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and completed a PhD at the Royal College of Art, London. Having spent periods teaching, researching and working in New York, Australia, and Glasgow – to name a few – he has chosen London to be his home for the last twenty-five years. Since the early 1990s, Löhr has focussed on producing small watercolours, and has gained in scope until producing large-scale works on canvas.

https://www.alflohr.org/